By 2016, some 36.7 million vehicles were registered for use on the roads of the U.K. Whilst sound statistics are available on human deaths from car / vehicle accidents , there is less reliable information on roadkill - the number of various animals killed on our roads each year. Some information can be found in government statistics (link opens a PDF file), which suggest that deer are the largest category of casualties - though foxes and badgers are not far behind.

Apart from the government stats, there are a number of other organisations like the People’s trust for endangered species (PTES) and Project Splatter that are trying to gather detailed information on roadkill, both have web sites and apps for recording details of roadkill. Read more...

There are many types of woodland, which may be broadly categorised by the dominant type of tree(s) - thus there is, birch woodland,oak woodland, beech woodland etc. The flora and fauna of these different types of woodland varies though there can be similarities. Some species, such as brambles and ivy can live in a variety of conditions whilst other plants / animals have very specific requirements.

This is certainly true for various animal species - for example, butterflies and moths. For example, the Brimstone (a pale yellow butterfly) has larvae (caterpillars) that need to feed Read more...

Italy has a long tradition of forestry management going back before Roman times, and ancient traditions very much influence Italy's woodlands today. For example, 40% of Italian wood production is chestnut or beech which, along with oak, would have been dominant species for the Romans. There are also lots of non-timber forest products that are important to Italians such as mushrooms, wild boar and firewood. Indeed compared to the UK, Italy gets a large proportion of its energy from woodfuel with almost 60% of cut wood being used for domestic heating. Read more...

Woodlands contribute substantially to the character of the countryside, clothing the sides of valleys and hillsides, forming copses and wider swathes of wood. The amount of woodland varies from county to county, in some areas broadleaved woodland dominates whereas others have a preponderance of coniferous plantation. The national average for woodland cover is about 8.3%, with Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire being some of the most ‘wooded’ counties. The oak is perhaps one of our largest native, broad-leaved trees. There are two native species of oak; the sessile oak (Quercus petraea) and the pedunculate oak (Quercus robur). Oaks are (generally) long-lived trees that grow quite slowly, compared to other broadleaved species. Both the pedunculate and sessile oak (and their hybrids) can grow to be very large trees. Old trees can have a circumference of 10+ metres. Read more...

There are a number of shrubs that have branched woody stems, which can grow to about one metre in height; and are associated with heaths and bogs. There is heather, bilberry, cowberry, crowberry and bearberry. However, the actual height of these plants is dependent on

their level of exposure to the elements (elevation and aspect) - particularly wind,

When I last saw Oliver Rackham I was infected by his curiosity. Someone suggested, as we walked though a woodland, that one spot might have been historically used for making charcoal so Dr Rackham dived into the undergrowth armed only with a set of keys and dug into the soil and he soon emerged triumphant with some old charred remains, proving definitively that this location had in fact been used for charcoal making. This sort of curiosity and dogged ferreting for facts runs through his new book on the ash tree. He considers what threats the ash tree faces, but he also uses the book as a platform for a wider diagnosis of the state of British woodlands. Read more...

The UK’s rapidly growing deer population is causing problems for the managers of woodlands of all sizes. The Deer Stalking Certificate Level 1 is a four-day course about how a deer population can be managed. Teaching ranges from lectures on deer biology and diseases to rifle safety and marksmanship.

The course I went on at Alice Holt Forest, in Hampshire, was run by Steve Wooley, a veteran stalker who has worked as a gamekeeper on a Scottish estate for 25 years - looking after a ‘patch’ of Forestry Commission land - being 10,000 acres of land.

All four days were fast-paced, so it was essential to have previously studied the manual which was sent out before the course started. However, it isn’t all theory: one day Steve turned up with a deer he’d shot that morning and “gralloched” it in front of us to show us how to check for signs of disease. Read more...

Forestry is a surprisingly important part of the Swiss economy and the sector employs 90,000 people, with 1.3 million hectares of Switzerland being given over to forestry. To put this in a UK perspective, it is about the same amount of forestry land as Scotland and is a little more than England (which has 1.1 million hectares of forest). The reason why Switzerland, smaller in size than England, has as much forestry land is that a much higher percentage of the countryside is given over to trees - Switzerland has 31% tree cover which is much more than England's 9% and is high even compared to Scotland which only has 17%. In fact European countries are generally more forested than the UK - with Finland at a whopping 76% tree cover and even France is 27%, so Switzerland stands at just above the european average. Read more...